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Downsizing Warren Moon moving football memorabilia

Former Eskimo and NFL hall of fame quarterback Warren Moon is auctioning off four of the five Grey Cup rings he won while playing for the Edmonton Eskimos. The rings are a part of a 72-piece online auction of Moon's memorabilia from his career. The auction ends on Saturday at 8 p.m. MT.Photo: Handout

EDMONTON — The list reads like a roll call of Warren Moon’s storied football career. Signed letterman jackets; game-worn jerseys and signed career-milestone footballs; a Rose Bowl championship ring from his time with the University of Washington; an NFL MVP trophy.

Most notable to fans of the Edmonton Eskimos, where Moon carved out a short but brilliant six-year career in the Canadian Football League, you’ll see four of his five Grey Cup rings as part of a massive, 72-piece online memorabilia auction.

Reached by phone in Houston, where he was scheduled to make a pair of appearances on Friday, Moon said the auction wasn’t an indication of a successful pro athlete’s finances gone awry.

“Do I need money? Oh, no. No, no, no,” Moon said. “I’m good that way. I was approached by the company (SCP Auctions, based in California) to do this and I thought a long time about it, I thought months about it, whether I wanted to part with this stuff or not.

“Other guys have done the same thing, I know Dr. J (Julius Erving) is a guy that auctioned off some of his stuff and different players that they mentioned to me, they showed me the way that they do it and how it’s done and it seemed like it’s done in a very classy way.”

Former Eskimo and NFL hall of fame quarterback Warren Moon is auctioning off four of the five Grey Cup rings he won while playing for the Edmonton Eskimos. The rings are a part of a 72-piece online auction of Moon’s memorabilia from his career. The auction ends on Saturday at 8 p.m. MT.

Now 57, the hall of famer in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and the Canadian Football Hall of Fame said he’s trying to downsize at this stage in his life.

“I kept the things that were really, really special to me but (it’s not hard to part with things) because that was a time in my life that was good. It was fun, I celebrated it,” Moon said.

“I had a trophy room, all of those things. I’ve since downsized my home. I used to have a really big home in Houston and when I was much younger and still playing, I displayed a lot of my things. I was never able to display everything and I was never a guy that wanted to make my house like a shrine of me.

“I wanted my home to be more of a home. I wanted a lot of pictures of my kids, pictures of my family and things like that, not so much about who I am. The trophies had never been a huge part of who I am. The accomplishments are in my mind and have been the more important thing to me.”

When he looked over his collection of rings, footballs, jerseys and even the final pair of shoulder pads and cleats he wore in the last years of his career, Moon did hang onto a few things. One of them was his 1980 Grey Cup ring.

FILE – In this Jan. 2, 1978 file photo, University of Washington Huskies’ Warren Moon (1) poses with coach Don James after the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. James, the longtime Washington football coach who led the Huskies to a share of the national championship in 1991, died Sunday, Oct. 20, 2013. He was 80. (AP Photo/File)

“It was probably the most special of them,” he said. The game that year wasn’t a close one — Moon won outstanding offensive player in a 48-10 demolition of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats — but it was his first year as a starter in the CFL.

“You want to keep one (ring),” he said. “I wanted to keep one (based on) certain things I went through and in certain places where I had success. There was no reason for me to keep all of them, just because they’re sitting in boxes.

“Same thing with my Pro Bowl watches or my … what else I have a lot of? Different footballs that I have, that have significance as far as milestones, things like that. I know what those things are and I’m almost 60 years old now so I have no use for those things.”

Now 12 years into his retirement from the NFL (he was just passed by New Orleans QB Drew Brees on Nov. 21 for the fifth spot on the NFL’s all-time passing yards list), Moon is enjoying life. He’s a broadcaster for the Seattle Seahawks and is a regular on TV in Seattle through the week. He’s three years’ deep into running a sports marketing and entertainment company in California (Sports1Marketing) and would love an opportunity to own a football team.

“Ownership would be something that I would be interested in and am still interested in the National Football League,” he said, adding that he keeps tabs on the Eskimos and felt for them as they went 4-14 this year. Given the stakeholder/community-owned status of the Eskimos, ownership of his former team is something he hasn’t considered.

“The way the team (the Eskimos) is set up, there is really no way that I could be the owner. If something like that was to come up, If I had an opportunity there, that would be something I would be very interested in,” he said.

While the B.C. Lions and Toronto Argonauts could be available for purchase in the next few years, Moon, like so many other former Eskimos, bleeds Green and Gold.

“If it was in the Canadian Football League it’d have to be to the Eskimos. My loyalty is definitely to that organization,” he said.